Additional cuts to the University of Wisconsin System and expected tuition hikes pose a threat to the reputation of campuses state-wide, UW System President Kevin Reilly said.
In addition to the initial $250 million in cuts to the UW System included in the state’s biennial budget, lawmakers told system leaders in October to plan for another $65.7 million in cuts this biennium; $46.1 million this year and $19.6 million next year.
UW-Madison will begin to absorb $18 million of the cuts included in the lapse for this fiscal year, and could take an additional $7.5 million next year.
“Sometimes you don’t know you’ve crossed the line in a downward direction until it has happened, and then it’s really hard to get the reputation back,” Reilly said. “It’s a lot easier to invest a little and keep the reputations high than it is to recover if you start to slip back because of budget cuts that damage the quality of education we offer our students and families.”
Reilly said faculty and staff members’ compensation could suffer as a result of the cuts, and the prospect of some of the best professors in the system leaving for other universities that are able to offer higher salaries “keeps him awake at night.”
His fear has become a reality at UW-Madison.
The masters program that trains students to be school counselors was eliminated after Professor Kimberly Howard, who ran the program, was offered $25,000 more to teach at Boston University this year.
“We’re not saying people at the universities of Wisconsin should be the highest paid faculty and staff in the world, we just want to get our institutions to the market rate of our peers so we can keep the good people we have and compete for new young talent,” Reilly said.
Reilly said the cuts could force universities to eliminate even more courses and increase the number of students in each class. As competition for the open spots in fewer classes increases, Reilly said it could be more difficult for students to enroll in their desired classes.
If students are unable to enroll in the necessary courses, it could take them longer to graduate, Reilly said. If students take longer to graduate, universities will be forced to accept fewer new students into their programs, “blocking the progress of everybody through the system,” he said.
This possibility poses a threat to the system’s goal to enroll 80,000 more students by 2025, Reilly said.
“We may well not be able to take as many students, we may not be able to graduate as many students in a timely way and that will disadvantage everybody in the state if that happens, not just our students,” Reilly said. “For competitiveness in the global college economy, this state needs more graduates.”
Currently, about 25 percent of Wisconsin citizens have a bachelor’s degree, in comparison to Minnesota’s roughly 32 percent and the national average of approximately 27 percent.
Not only may fewer students be able to graduate from UW schools, but the students who do may have to bear a greater financial burden.
Tuition was raised by 5.5 percent this year, and Reilly said students can most likely expect to see another 5.5 percent increase next year in order to help the system stomach the cuts.
However, these increases make up for less than 30 percent of the total cuts to the system this year.
“The genius, I think, of the American experience is that we’ve said ‘higher education ought to be available to individuals regardless of family wealth,’” Reilly said. “If higher education, especially the more selective institutions become the products of the wealthiest families only because nobody else can afford the tuition, we will have lost a big part of the American dream and we don’t want to go there.”
Even with tuition hikes, UW-Madison students are still seeing popular courses being eliminated.
For example, 29 one-credit physical education courses will be eliminated by the end of 2012 due to funding shortages. The twelve part-time staff members who teach most of the courses, some of which include fencing, yoga, bowling and badminton, will be laid off.
Cutting the physical education classes will trim the School of Education’s kinesiology department’s budget by about 7 percent, but the department will still have to eliminate another 1.5 percent of its budget to stomach the additional cuts from the lapse.
Additionally, the School of Human Ecology’s consumer affairs major is being eliminated because of a lack of funding; there is currently only enough money to fill four of the 11 vacant faculty positions in the program.
Over 160 students at UW-Madison are currently enrolled in the major, and will be allowed to finish completing their degrees.
“We have to make some pretty serious budget cuts and we’re at the point right now where we have cut to the bone and the only place we have to turn now are eliminating faculty lines,” SoHE Dean Robin Douthitt said in December. “If we eliminate faculty lines, we have to eliminate programs; we don’t have the luxury of doing anything else.”
